Anita,Thanks for your comments. It would have been helpful if there was data for average weekly wage for the "0 employees" category. We can certainly calculate how many people are involved in firms with 0 employees as being 53,622 [the number of firms].

Another point that usually goes without being said is that small businesses grow and large businesses shrink. Once a firm is fully scaled up they seek to become more productive [read: expense reduction, slowing sales growth etc] and hence substitute technology for people/labor. The Big 3 automakers have been shrinking their labor pool for decades. They increased their use of automation [technology] to reduce their employee count.

Hopefully many small firms [0-99 employees] become firms with 100-249 employees. We need policies that encourage [rather than discourage] these firms to invest and grow.

Why 100-249?

The positive impact from successful firms of this size is huge. They have the most jobs as a raw number per firm size [615,962]. The cost to society of any one firm of this size failing are minuscule compared to say any one firm with 1000+ employees.